Provided with a remarkable collection, Mercure de France follows an exacting editorial policy: French and foreign literature, poetry, history, anthologies... Awarded many times, the publishing house is associated with prestigious names: Romain Gary, Colette, Ionesco , André Gide, André du Bouchet, Henri Michaux, Adonis, Yves Bonnefoy, Andréï Makine, Gilles Leroy, Anne Serre, Gwenaëlle Aubry, Julian Barnes...
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Frayed Edge Press is a small independent publishing house based in Philadelphia. We publish literary fiction and poetry, as well asnon-fiction titles in history and political science. We also publish the Street Smart Series of Short Fiction, consisting of contemporary, urban-set novelette-length works. We especially welcome marginalized voices, both historical and contemporary, including women, people of color, ethnic and religious minorities, the LGBTQ+ community, and progressive political viewpoints. We particularly seek to publish works that wrestle with important questions challenging contemporary society, including political and environmental concerns, civil rights, women's rights, and sustainability.
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The novel Unterstadt tells the story of an urban family of German origin living in Osijek from the end of the nineteenth till the end of the twentieth century. It is narrated through the portrayal of the destinies of four generations of women – a great grandmother, a grandmother, mother, and a daughter – their shattered illusions, the education of their children, the historical events that brutally lash out at them. Ivana Šojat-Kuči creates a world rich in detail and nuance, all her characters, both major and minor, are expressive and suggestive, abundant in virtues and flaws, complex and multidimensional, as life itself is. By depicting a clash of generations through the female characters of a family, the author creates a world in which, often due to bizarre strokes of fate or wrongly selected life-cards, both horrible and beautiful events occur. Yet the central theme, running through all the generations and all the characters, is that of hiding away from the past, fleeing from it, concealing it, which sooner or later leads to traumas and misunderstandings. Unterstadt is a book about a family and a town, written in the manner of the best and greatest modernist novels. Through the history of one family, it speaks of the twentieth century in a multiethnic town, of dictatorships, of wrongly selected sides, of fate which one can hardly defy. Unterstadt reveals the richness of Ivana Šojat-Kuči’s narrative talent, and it is thus not surprising that she has emerged as one of the most interesting writers of contemporary Croatian prose.
Vladimir Stojsavljević's Život bez imena (Life Without a Name) is one of those novels bound to cause a commotion in the public life. This novel written in an uncompromising manner speaks about the life of Mary Magdalene, about Jesus, Međugorje, Sarajevo… In an entirely original manner, the novel Life Without a Name narrates about the eternal topics of truth and lies, love and hate, good and evil. By means of parallel stories, Vladimir Stojsavljević creates an image of human past and present, and his writing out a magnificent love novel is enabled by the characters such as Mary Magdalene, Jesus, Mary, Pontius Pilate, Marija and Varja who had visions of the Virgin Mary in Međugorje, their parents, members of the Yugoslav State Security Service, as well as the citizens of Sarajevo, from Zuhra, a psychologist, to Estera, an old historian. Life Without a Name narrates about women during difficult times when, going through the wringer of politics, religion, and love, they always choose an emotion, the emotion they are willing to make every sacrifice for.
Waste land, void, the return to no-man's-land, disintegration and the departure from history represent only some of the large topics encompassed by There Would Not Be Any Miracles Here (Ovdje neće biti čuda), the first novel written by Goran Ferčec, one of the most talented playwrights of the younger generation. Bender, the protagonist, is a young intellectual facing an identity crisis in the western metropolis the name of which the reader does not learn, where he has settled down during the wars in these parts of the world. An escapist running away from not only the past but everyday life as well, he is loaded with self-doubt. While being in such an entirely damaged position, an unexpected call from his father prompts him to return to his home country, to the village he has originated from, where after the ravages of war almost no one lives any more. The return from the urban anti-utopian reality to the rural waste land does not take place only on the realistic, physical level of the journey, but also, in an even more evident manner, in the protagonist's consciousness. His conflict with himself, his own demons, and his father, as well as the inability to escape his own fate, lead him towards the utter negation of reality. Ovdje neće biti čuda is one of those novels posing real questions, although not providing any answers because they do not even exist. Ferčec’s protagonist Bender is an emblematic contemporary intellectual who can only search, and in this search completely disappear because the consequences of wars, transition and contemporary life are such that they leave a contemplating individual with no perspective save the sheer void, which may be, but not necessarily, the starting point of the creation of the new.
With each new book, Semezdin Mehmedinović creates a new space, eludes the usual judgements and moves away from acquired definitions. His prose contains both the real and the imagined, and the author gives a whole new view not only of autobiographical writing, but also of our experience of literature. Sketches in which he registers everyday life, describes the people he sees or remembers, with people close or unfamiliar to the author, match harmoniously the drawings made on knees, or while driving on a subway, or on iPad. Those incredibly precise and surprisingly beautiful drawings give the book a new dimension. Self-portrait With A Bag (Autoportret s torbom) is a book which evokes bottled-up emotions and joy of life. More than anything else, this book is Semezedin's self-portrait, disclosing him heart and soul, sharing with the reader his everyday rituals, his reading, films, and thoughts about his friends.
In her book April in Berlin (April u Berlinu), Daša Drndić uncompromisingly towards herself, towards her characters and readers, towards history, researches the destinies of emigrants and immigrants that have marked the twentieth century. Through personal stories, her own as well as those of her interlocutors, of noted and well-known people but also of so-called ordinary, “insignificant”, individuals, Drndić creates a big story. April in Berlin explores and dissects the history of Middle Europe, that imaginary yet existing area that has, more than by its geographical facts, been defined by its inhabitants and their destinies, their migrations determined both by economy and politics. The people whose lives have been moulded by politics and history, who have for generations been moving throughout Europe, but also throughout the world, thus turn Middle Europe into much more than a geographic point of reference they transform it into a human map. Precisely that human map which marked the twentieth century and is making an imprint on the twenty-first, that code inscribed into human fates, is what Daša Drndić reveals and offers through her book, whether it be by narrating her own story, that of the fate of her family, or the stories of real and fictional characters she directly communicates with. As if through a kaleidoscope, the author enters the intimate world of every reader, making him start a personal quest of his own and his family’s past.
Time of Lies (Vrijeme laži), the first part of the trilogy entitled Taboo, is a novel about Viktor Tausk, one of the most interesting personalities of Croatian Literary Modernism. Through the destiny of that forgotten writer, lawyer and psychoanalyst, who was among other things a friend of Sigmund Freud and a lover of Lou Salomé, the femme fatale of Viennese fin de siècle, Sibila Petlevski will spin an exciting trilogy interlacing the present time and the beginning of the twentieth century, the First World War, spy secrets, sexuality and feminism issues, all the questions raised by Viennese Modernism which remain to be crucial for the understanding of the contemporary man. In an intriguing way, through the character of the authoress and her friend Tvrtko, who are interested in Tausk, Time of Lies introduces us into the trilogy and the dramatic twentieth century. In the first part of Taboo, Sibila Petlevski sets the coordinates, but she also brings to life all the dramatic quality and the unique gallery of both real and invented characters who strongly mark the tragedy of the intellectual Viktor Tausk. The trilogy Taboo is dedicated to the brave, to those who do not accept to live in the time of lies; to the people who are not afraid of freedom.
We Had Such A Nice Time! (Bilo nam je tako lijepo!) is the second part of the trilogy entitled Taboo, in which Sibila Petlevski speaks about Viktor Tausk, the emblematic figure of fin de siècle, from a totally different angle and in a totally different way.Written as a biographical novel and a family saga, We Had Such A Nice Time! is a story about a psychoanalyst whose life is actually the psychogram of the twentieth century. Skillfully balancing between facts and fiction and playing with them, writing about Tausk’s life, Sibila Petlevski deals with the themes which Tausk’s time brought up and which remain inevitable to this day - from the question of nation and religion, through sexuality and death, to all kinds of freedom. In the life of Viktor Tausk and his relatives, particularly of his sister Jelka, eroticism and politics, love and death, responsibility towards the other and the undying longing for all kinds of freedom constantly interweave. We Had Such A Nice Time! is an apologia of the search for happiness and the need to keep searching for it, while Viktor Tausk himself is one of those real, historical persons who were brave enough to set off for that search.
At the very end of the twentieth century, Miroslav/Frederick comes from America to his native provincial town, the imaginary but very real Gradec, where, attending the funeral of his stepmother, he meets his old love, the unforgettable Gabrijela, whose running away with the circus has marked his whole life. The two old people try to flare up the flame of adolescent love in the world which disappears together with the century which reaches its end, melting behind them like sugar wool. Gabrijela and Miroslav led totally different lives and through their destinies that time gets distorted like in a mirror hall. Miroslav is a Jew, who was brought up without the knowledge of his Jewishness. He is a parlor leftist, skeptic, individualist, scientist who always has doubts and believes only in the ideals of a better and fairer society. Unlike him, Gabrijela has always readily accepted every religion, socialism, Catholicism and nationalism alike, and now she believes in the need for peace and living together. She gives herself completely and unquestioningly to all her religions, putting herself and her talent for fortune telling and curing diseases by old, almost witchlike methods into them. Through the destinies of these two unusual characters, Bauer has given a graphic picture of our provinces, their citizens and the prejudices that have burdened them from times immemorial. Carousel (Karusel) is a novel of strong personalities whose destinies have a universal value, and their efforts to survive in the mill-wheel of history acquire the characteristics of true heroism.
Ludwig Bauer’s large topics – the fate of the Danube-region Germans, an individual versus the system, as well as the relations between a man and a woman in history-burdened times – deeply infuse the novel Homeland, Oblivion (Zavičaj, zaborav). The protagonist is a genuine idealist, a man who has not been pampered by life. Growing up with foster parents, only later, as a young man, does he learn his real name and origins. In order to escape the narrowness of his homeland, he goes to a large city to study there, and leftist ideals lead him even further to czechoslovakia and East Germany. Through the search of an individual for his roots, Ludwig Bauer narrates about every person’s elusive wish to escape from themselves, and the need to confront their own past as well. Homeland, Oblivion is an extremely dynamic and filmic novel about nostalgia, childhood, and the unstoppable wheel of history, bursting with emotions and magnificent images.
Vladimir Stojsavljević’s novel Summer War Journal (Ljetni dnevnik rata) is the first prose about the war in Croatia. It was written during the air raids, when everything was so dramatic; when Vukovar was about to fall, when TV and journals newsflashed about the occupation and growing number of victims, and when harsh reality invaded the life of every single person. Yet it has preserved its exceptionally fresh, intriguing, bursting, life-like quality for over twenty years since the first edition. Looking at the world through the eyes of an adolescent, Vladimir Stojsavljević perfectly depicts the atmosphere of the 1991 Zagreb, when friends and lovers were falling apart and everyone showed what they were really made of.Summer War Journal clearly shows that what is crucial for a powerful portrayal of the contemporary world is not time, but another sort of detachment - the artistic one. His journal, written on the spot, in one breath, swiftly exchanging strong images and characters, still brings exceptionally impressive pages about the war and its consequences for the lives of all people. This is a novel about the year of no return.
The stories of Neda Miranda Blažević-Krietzman are set from the coast of California to Darda, from New York to Zagreb, featuring poorly educated immigrants and top intellectuals, young men and women with iPads, as well as old people with the PTSS. Convincing in characterization of the protagonists, impeccable in language bravuras and word plays, intense in emotions, all thirteen stories included in the book Marylin Monroe, My Mother (Marylin Monroe, moja majka) bring to life the people whose destinies and life situations are very much real and possible. Besides, they involve famous artists, actors, singers and writers who have a direct or indirect influence on the protagonists. In every story, in every little piece of the world which gets revived through her writing, Neda Miranda Blažević-Krietzman creates unique situations, around which her protagonists find their way with aplomb, and through them she depicts the problems of an individual in the modern world; from the search for identity, real or invented, to love and emotional peaks or failures. Marylin Monroe, My Mother is a collection of short stories which not only reflects the world of today or that of the recent past, but also shows how it is not enough to get one’s fifteen minutes of Warholian fame, but iscrucial to reach the balance with oneself and one’s desires.
In many respects, Tatjana Gromača stands out in the Croatian literary scene; she makes no compromises, keeps out of trends, and paints new literary landscapes. Her latest novel God’s Children (Božanska dječica) is no exception. Gromača is decisive, intimately frank, unflattering, absolutely unsparing when it comes to herself and her closest relations. The reader witnesses an unfolding of a psychiatric disease and how the protagonist has to face it in every single aspect, from the outward to the most inward. In the minutiae of style Tatjana Gromača is a perfectionist, whose sentences unmistakeably hit the bull’s eye. The novel God’s Children commands attentive reading and willingness to face one’s own traumas. It blends cathartic and powerful prose fragments that through one woman’s destiny combine and unfold the darkest personal traumas of an individual scarred by her otherness. Gromača’s prose is primordial, devoid of ornamentation and unnecessary detailing, bare to the bone, which makes its reading as powerful as that of a Greek tragedy.
In the near future, the world will have changed completely; states and governments will have yielded power to corporations, and our planet is now called Friedman. People live in zones corresponding to their social status; A-zone is reserved for the elite, B-zone for the ones who can still hope, and C-zone for the rejected ones. Greed and money make the world go round; they are absolute virtues, while emotions are a useless burden. Parents and children live apart, and no one cares about the imminent environmental disaster.Physician Gerhard Schmidt is a model member of the elite. He works for a pharmaceutical company, developing doping-drugs and taking care of the athlete star Paula Bolt. Stimulants in sports are common and welcome, and sport shows are as popular as reality shows among the crowd. Paula Bolt grew up in B-zone and brought along books, which no longer exist on the planet. Shakespeare and Yeats will turn Schmidt around, and he will help Paula in her search for the mysterious revolutionary leader.Planet Friedman by one of the best contemporary writers Josip Mlakić brims with allusions to global corporations and contemporary reality. This anti-utopia speaks vehemently advertisements and the real rulers of our planet. In an emotionless world,Mlakić’s protagonists gradually discover seeds of love and bring hope, but is hope enough to change the world?
